Monday, August 12, 2013

Something's Happening Here; What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear

Almost 50 years ago a prescient
Buffalo Springfield recording captured a mood that's creeping across the
country today. That spirit is alive in Texas, Missouri, California, Oklahoma --
well, almost anywhere reactionary forces are doing their best to stifle
dissent, silence women's voices and demonize those who follow the beat of the
different drummer.

And once again, as we ease up on Molly's Aug. 30 birthdate I pine for her voice,
knowing she would have a better way of dealing with oday's swirl of events.

I managed to stave off apoplexy
while reading a David Brooks column a while back, excoriating Edward Snowden, who spilled the
beans on wholesale government-sanctioned information gathering. As was the case
with Bradley Manning, his biggest crime seems to have been embarrassing the government, not
divulging state secrets -- at least as far as we know. Reading Brooks column moved
me to trot out a t-shirt I received a couple of years ago as a bonus for
subscribing to The Nation. It said, simply, "Secrecy Breeds Tyranny."

By now there can't be anyone
unfamiliar with the tragic Sanford, Florida death of Trayvon Martin -- or other
black men who have been fatally wounded by law enforcement officers since then.But lest we forget, abuse at the hands of
those ostensibly designed to serve and protect is not reserved exclusively for
black men -- even though it often seems that way.

What we have done to our own
boggles the mind -- and we didn't need Bradley Manning or Anthony Snowden to tell
us about some of the cases that have surfaced.

Take the case of Daniel
Chong, a California university student who almost
died in police custody last year. He recently won a multimillion-dollar
lawsuit against the Drug Enforcement Agency, but how will he recover psychologically
from being handcuffed in a federal holding cell for nearly five days without
food or water -- and spending time in intensive care as a result?

Will Trayvon Martin's parents get anything close to that?

Chong was detained in the spring of
last year in conjunction with a San Diego drug raid. After it was determined
that he was not involved in illicit activity, a member of the task force that
conducted the raid put him in a cell and apparently forgot about him. For days. By the
time he was found he was suffering from severe dehydration, muscle
deterioration, hallucinations, liver and kidney failure, and extremely high
levels of sodium. One of his attorneys was quoted as saying, “What happened to
Daniel Chong should never happen to any human being on the face of the planet.”

He might never be the same, but at least he's alive to tell the tale.

Marissa Alexander is also alive, but, one might ask, so what? Until her recent Florida (again!) Marissa Alexander had no criminal record, no history of violence and
no brushes with the law before she fired a warning shot into a wall in response
to an advancing abusive husband.

Oh, did I omit the part about him being at her
house despite the fact that she had a restraining order?

She received a 20-year sentence for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. . He's still walking around
loose. A judge dismissed her "stand your ground" claim, noting that
she could have run back into the house to escape her husband. Instead she got a gun.
Alexander, obviously erroneously anticipating a rational outcome, rejected a plea deal that would have resulted
in a three-year prison sentence and chose a jury trial. It deliberated 12
minutes before convicting her. After, all the judge said, she could have run.

We have a war of terror right here. We can talk big game about protecting other countries
from tyranny, but we destroy civilian lives in a tyrannical war against women, the poor and ethnic minorities. We lie about the number of innocents we kill in the name
of an invisible enemy called "terror," but we ignore the terror
blacks, browns, gays and poor whites experience daily.

We continue to trot out tired iconic
has-beens like Rudy Giuliani, whose post 9/11 rhetoric has long since lost its
potency, to persuade us that the war on you-know-what forces us to be ever
vigilant. We conjure up scary color-coded "threat levels" that keep otherwise
sensible citizens just where a manipulative government wants us: frightened.So we lose focus on what's happening under our local noses.

So allow me to trot out a notion I fully
support: eternal vigilance is still the price of freedom, but not at the expense of
constitutional guarantees; not at the expense of having conversations, emails
and personal correspondence of every Tom, Dick and Henrietta exposed to
government scrutiny in the name of protecting us from terrorism; not with the
passage of inflexible draconian laws thatturn around and bite civil rights on the butt; not at the expense of keeping state
governments out of women's vaginas.

So now I'm back to the closing
stanza of "For What It's Worth," the Buffalo Springfield song that
became an antiwar anthem in the 1960s:

Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep

It starts when you're always afraid

You step out of line,

The man come and take you away

They took Manning away and rigged
his courts martial so only dribs and drabs of the bizarre proceedings against
him could reach us. The Justice Department might or might not take a second
look at George Zimmerman's pathetic gun love. A benevolent justice system might eventually show Marissa Alexander justice. Daniel Chong might be OK, and yes, the $4 million might help, but it's gonna take a while..

Lots of maybes, lots of mights.

It remains to be seen what will happen them all, just as it
remains to be seen what's really happening here, 'cause what it is ain't
exactly clear.

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About Ellen Sweets

Ellen: Author, Food Freak

Before she adjourned to Austin to write "Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins," Ellen Sweets covered everything from fires, fights and homicides to to an eclectic range of topics that focused on food. She began her career at her father's black weekly newspaper, the St. Louis American and moved on to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, The Austin American-Statesman and Edible Austin and Texas Co-Op Power magazines. Her honors include the James Beard Foundation Award for best food section.